This review was originally published in the Chicago Tribune on Dec. 27, 1944.
Too many theatrical bubbles burst in the blowing, but “The Glass Menagerie” holds in its shadowed fragility the stamina of success. This brand new play, which turned the Civic theater into a place of steadily increasing enchantment last night, is still fluid with change, but it is vividly written, and in the main superbly acted. Paradoxically, it is a dream in the dust and a tough little play that knows people and how they tick. Etched in the shadows of a man’s memory, it comes alive in theater terms of words, motion, lighting, and music. If it is your play, as it is mine, it reaches out tentacles, first tentative, then gripping and you are caught in its spell.
Tennessee Williams, who wrote it, has been unbelievably lucky. His play, which might have been smashed by the insensitive or botched by the fatuous, has fallen into expert hands. He found Eddie Dowling, who liked it enough to fight for it, Jo Mielziner, who devoted his first time out of army service to lighting it magnificently, and Laurette Taylor, who chose it for her return to the stage. He found other people, too, but ah, that Laurette Taylor!
I never saw Miss Taylor as Peg, but if that was the role of her youth, this is the role of her maturity. As a draggled southern belle who married the wrong man, living in a near-tenement, alienating her children by her nagging fight to shove them up to her pathetically remembered gentility, she gives a magnificent performance. The crest of her career in the delta was the simultaneous arrival of 17 gentlemen callers, and her pitiful quest in the play-as often funny as sad-is the acquisition of just one gentleman caller for her neurotically shy daughter, the crippled girl played by Julie Haydon. Her preparations for that creature, once she has heckled her son into inviting him, his arrival in the hilarious extrovert played by Anthony Ross, and the aftermath of frustration-these are not things quickly told in their true terms. They are theater, and they take seeing.
Fortunately, I have been able to hang around the Civic at previews and I have seen “The Glass Menagerie” twice. Mr. Dowling was good last night in the double role of the son and narrator (who says the first narrator was the angel of the annunciation), but he is twice as good as that when he is relaxed and easy. He had strokes of brilliance last night, but the long easy stride of his earlier performance is on a plane with Miss Taylor’s playing and gives the play greater strength.
Mr. Ross enters late, but he leaves an impression as unforgettable as his green coat and his face, which is perilously close to being a mug. Late of “Winged Victory,” this stalwart actor does a superb job as the gentleman caller who finds his visit a little more than he bargained for. Which leaves only Julie Haydon and there, frankly, I’m puzzled. At times she has the frailty of the glass animals of the title which are her refuge from reality. But I couldn’t quite believe her, and my sympathy went to her nagging mother and her frustrated brother-because whatever the writing, acting is the final word, and they acted circles around her.
